The royals - Kitty Kelley [297]
* The official engagement photograph shows Philip, handsome in his uniform, beside Elizabeth, her hands folded to display her platinum ring. A friend recalled how thrilled she was with the ring, which symbolized the end of her drab years and the beginning of a happy future. Elizabeth said, “It’s like turning a page in a book.”
* “Philip, who has great humor, joked about my being blacklisted,” recalled Larry Adler. “When we were served White Baits at luncheon one day, he said, ‘In Larry’s honor, the fish should be called Red Baits.’ Philip also suggested that I be listed as ‘a distant country subversive member.’ He later talked to me about the blacklist and asked how I coped with it. He seemed to be very much against such a thing as a blacklist.”
* In 1945 Winston Churchill declined the Garter. “I could not accept the Order of the Garter from my sovereign when I had received the order of the boot from his people,” he said. Later Princess Elizabeth approached him. “If you are Prime Minister when I become Queen, I would like you to be my first Garter Knight.” She kept her promise and made him a knight on April 24, 1953, and installed him June 14, 1954.
* Reports of Elizabeth’s faultless French made her former French chef, René Roussin, smile. “I treasure the memory that I was one of the first Frenchmen to converse with her in my own language,” he wrote in Good Housekeeping in September 1955.
“ ‘Did I say that correctly, Roussin?’ she used to say. And if her accent did not seem to me to be quite right, I never said so. For the only time I did criticize, her little face fell, and she looked so downcast I never had the heart to do it again.”
* British Information Services, an agency of the British government, issued a six-page advisory on the birth of Princess Elizabeth’s baby to resolve the complicated issues of the baby’s rank and title.
* The governess always nourished the hope that she would be forgiven by the royal family. She saved the letters the Queen wrote to her during the 1936 royal tour of Canada, as well as photographs of Lilibet and Margaret Rose in the royal nursery and the birthday and Christmas cards the little girls sent her. Rather than sell her precious mementos, she bequeathed them to Lilibet in her will. When Crawfie died, her box of treasures disappeared into the vaults of the royal archive at Windsor Castle, which the Queen controls.
* The following notice was given to all members of the royal household: “Communications to the Press: You are not permitted to publish any incident or conversation which may be within your knowledge by reason of your employment in the royal service, nor may you give to any person, either verbally or in writing, any information regarding Her Majesty, or any member of the Royal Family, which might be communicated to the press.”
* Forty years later, when Flamini wrote Sovereign: Elizabeth II and the Windsor Dynasty (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1991), he recorded his introduction to Princess Elizabeth but was forced to alter the dialogue slightly. “The publishing lawyers refused to let me quote the future Queen of England calling her sister a ‘bitch,’ ” he said. “Although I was there and heard what she said, the lawyers maintained that no one would ever believe Elizabeth referred to her sister that way.”
* U.S. diplomatic memos suggest that the official invitation to Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh had to be coaxed out of the State Department. The cable to the Secretary of State, dated July 5, 1951, states: “Were no official